Creating animated graphics from solidworks 2004/05

I have gotten my Engineering department to make me a 3D image of our company logo. I thought it would be a neat touch to replace MS flag/globe in IE with the image they created for me. I know its possible to globally change that setting through group policy but my problem is...I'm not a graphic guy. Does anyone know how I might convert my Solidworks image into a rotating gif image?

An animated .gif is simply a series of .gif images displayed one after another - essentially the frames of a very short movie. It can be set to repeat, or to run through one time and quit. The time between the frames can be set for different effects.

There are basically two ways of going about creating one of these. One is to make the series of .gifs which will make up the animation, and then compile them together with a graphics program. The two programs I use are Paint Shop Pro (PSP) and Gif Construction Set. (About the software options: http://desktoppublishing.com/reviews/animbegin.html).

The other way is to create your animation in Macromedia's Flash software, and then turn it into an animated .gif. Flash has an "Export as animated GIF" option, which is not great, but for something simple would do the job. You can also save a series of single images from your flash movie and them turn them into a animated .gif with the software above. A good helper application like FlashDigger Plus (http://www.flashdig.com/) will help you extract the individual images you need.

Have never used SolidWorks but can get access to it on Monday but in the meantime can you look and see if there are any options under the 'File' menu to export the drawing to gif or to 'save as' and then look for gif from the dropdown box.

From searching the Solidworks website, it looks like AVI output is possible. There are any number of converters to convert an AVI file to GIF format, try searching http://www.download.com for "avi to gif converter".

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